MWC 2011

So I was standing there, minding my own business in an oddly calm moment during the several day madhouse that was Mobile World Congress 2011, and there they were, a man who could only say "Action," and a man who had clearly practiced his news voice for many many years. They were standing along the main drag of the convention (the whole convention is a big L shape, they were near the entrance,) and were doing multiple takes of the scene you're about to see (completely and totally exclusively behind the scenes, of course.)

Welcome to the latest edition of the SlashGear Week in Review. This week was MWC 2011 in Barcelona, Spain so there are hoards of phone announcements from the show. The Smasung Galaxy S II went official last Sunday packing in a 4.27-inch screen with WVGA resolution and a 1GHz processor. On Monday we landed some hands on time with the Galaxy S II and put that time on video for you to check out. We think that the smartphone is hugely impressive.

Another year, another Mobile World Congress, and the unstoppable juggernaut that is the smartphone industry continues apace. SlashGear took its biggest team to MWC 2011 to-date, and still found more than enough to keep us busy in Barcelona. After the cut, the stand-out products, the key mobile themes of 2011, and how tablets are muscling in on smart mobility.

We were only just talking about Sony Ericsson's Android tablet plans, and now shots of what could be the company's 4G prototype have emerged from deep in the TDIAMWC 2011 booth. NieuweMobiel spotted the slate - branded with the TD-LTE 4G used by China Mobile, the carrier which Sony Ericsson has already said it is working with - complete with a front-facing 3.0-megapixel webcam and what's estimated to be a 6 to 7-inch touchscreen.

Apple is infamously against attending any of the big trade shows that come around each year. The company doens't do CES nor does it attend MWC. That lack of attendance doesn’t mean the geeks that are at the shows aren't thinking about the wares offered by Cupertino.

I'm sure all of us have watched something jump off the screen of a 3D movie and wanted to grab at it as it floated before our 3D-bespectacled eyes. Now wouldn't it be cool if you really could interact with that floating object? Leave it to Japanese mobile operator DoCoMo to inch us forward in this direction. Always sure to bring something that’s just outside the box every year at MWC, DoCoMo is showing off something they call Touchable 3D which will make users feel as if they are actually touching a 3D image.

Early on at the 2011 Mobile World Congress, Samsung and NVIDIA made an announcement that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 will be made with NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC (I9103). They also announced that they would be working on a new superphone based on Tegra 2. But at Samsung's press conference, we saw the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Galaxy S II, using Samsung's Exynos SoC (GT-I9100). There was no mention of NVIDIA or Tegra 2. Why would Samsung use Tegra 2 when it already has a Exynos-based smartphone?

If we take a look back at the past 30+ years of computing we can honestly say one technological advancement has constantly driven computing forward, that one thing is the microprocessor. Intel has led much of this computing revolution creating the world’s fastest microprocessors for computers. Today, bringing faster and more powerful microprocessors beyond computers and to mobile devices is the central focus of many. This time however Intel is not leading the charge.

Yesterday HTC announced two new phones the ChaCha and the Salsa. Each included a new and unique implementation with the social networking giant Facebook. As I listened to HTC CMO John Wang talk about how deeply they integrated the Facebook experience into these devices I became convinced they are on to something.